Rackspace Global Solutions and Services: the Evolution of IT Transformation

From our start almost 18 years ago, Rackspace has evolved to meet our customers’ needs, from straightforward hosting to the development of our public cloud to managing the increasing complexity of a multi-cloud world.

That evolution continues today, with the launch of Rackspace Global Solutions and Services, which expands and refines our ability to work with you from the very beginning of your cloud journey, individually tailoring the process, from planning to design to migration to optimization, to your unique needs.

Customers come to Rackspace with a variety of needs and goals: perhaps you have been mandated out of your data center, or you are actively seeking to accelerate business transformation, access to new markets and revenue streams. You want to reduce risk and increase governance over your IT functions, manage costs, boost flexibility and the ability to quickly respond to market changes.

Global Solutions and Services offers end-to-end world-class expertise and professional services. Taking advantage of our years of multi-cloud expertise, you can partner with Rackspace for solutions to your organization’s particular challenges, consuming just the services you need, when you need them, to accelerate growth and innovation in the cloud, enabling faster and more efficient IT transformation.

What is not new is Rackspace’s industry leading Fanatical Support, which we will continue to provide as we transform from managed service provider to trusted partner, offering professional services based on the best practices our engineers and architects have honed during almost two decades of service for customers around the globe.

We have heard you, our customers, loud and clear: whether you’re just beginning to grapple with a move to the cloud, are in the process of moving out of the data center or are already juggling workloads on multiple clouds, you need guidance. And because Rackspace offers expert support for every leading public cloud, developed and runs one of the most robust private cloud platforms in the world and offers dedicated hosting for needs outside the cloud, we are empowered to craft exactly the right solution for each customer.

Our focus is on customer success with a fanatical approach. We support you as much or as little as you need to enable that success, wherever you are along the cloud journey. Across all industries, from small to midmarket to the enterprise, customers tell us you’re seeking a platform and a culture that allows for innovation. You’re seeking stronger governance and control over costs. Demanding increased performance, scalability and security. What you don’t have, or need more of, is that level of cloud expertise within your organizations. We are that trusted advisor and cloud expert providing a point of view on the solution that best meets your priorities and approach.

We are the cloud experts. More than half of our global workforce consists of engineers and architects, who hold advanced level certifications in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, VMware and OpenStack. Global Solutions and Services provides these specific experts across all leading clouds, using lessons learned and proven methodologies for success. We support our customers’ IT, data, and application transformations to a secured cloud environment.

We have also expanded our partner services ecosystem, so if we need to complement our team with additional skills, we have a trusted pool of specialists to ensure we deliver the right end-end solution for customers.

As we formalized our methodologies, we developed a roadmap of our customer’s cloud journey. Ideally, we are working with our customers from the earliest stages of that journey, creating a cohesive strategy based on individual goals and resources. But we can help at any point along the way: We can provide advice, expertise, enablement, all the way through execution leveraging and enabling your experts working in partnership or taking on all of the heavy lifting, yours to define.

Plan: We’ll help create a strong business case with clear goals, strategy, TCO, set the scope, create a roadmap, security, and a governance framework.

Assess: We will assess the readiness to move to the cloud, we will identify IT and business challenges, security requirements, share best practices and apply our methodology, and identify outstanding issues. We’ll design a proof of concept to pilot our solution as appropriate.

Portfolio Solution Architects: broad technical knowledge of the entire Rackspace portfolio. They work directly with you to identify which cloud platforms and technologies are the best fit for each customer. Meet some of our architects.

Specialized Solution Architects: world class IT pros with tremendous depth of knowledge. They help you plan specific solutions once the cloud platform has been selected. Meet some of our engineers.

Professional Services: advanced cloud consultants and partners who work to architect, migrate, manage and continually optimize the selected solutions. Includes a project management office focused on consulting projects. Professional Services includes the following services:

Cloud

Multi-Cloud Adoption Accelerator

Migration Services

Load Testing

Application

DevOps Accelerator

DevOps Projects

DevOps Maintenance

Data

Big Data Accelerator

Governance & Security

Security Testing

Project Management as a Service

IT transformation is critical for companies that want to stay ahead of disruptions while accelerating growth and innovation — but it’s not easy. The options are almost unlimited.

Now, organizations don’t have to go it alone or rely on a provider with a one-size-fits-all platform or technology. With Rackspace Global Solutions and Services, you can get unbiased guidance with the breadth and depth that comes with our deep bench of expertise and long history managing mission critical cloud applications at scale across leading cloud platforms.

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Rachel Cassidy is Senior Vice President and General Manager for Professional Services at Rackspace. She oversees the company’s portfolio of professional services in the Americas, serving as our customers’ trusted advisors across all platforms through their IT transformations. She also is responsible for the Global Service Catalogue defining Rackspace’s professional services strategy and offerings.
Prior to this role, Rachel served as Vice President of Global Solutions and Services at Rackspace, evolving and building professional services, strategic deal desk and technical sales focused on breadth and depth of knowledge defining solutions for our customer.
Before coming to Rackspace, Rachel spent a decade at Red Hat, where she built out the pre-sales and professional services organization as Vice President of Global Professional Services. She later worked to create a robust global partner ecosystem, serving as the Vice President of Global Partner and Technical Enablement.
Rachel has been recognized as one of CRN’s Women of the Channel Power 100 and as a CRN Channel Chief. She holds a BS from Cornell University and an MSM from the Georgia Institute of Technology.